No one thought he was a good person there. From my understanding, the University’s main selling point is he’s just a fundraising figure head. Also, I thought it pretty ironic the man known for destroying Purdue’s State funding would get a job there immediately after his political career ended.

You mean “no one thought he was a good person except the people who were appointed to the trustees by him so they could appoint him as president”. Oh, and I imagine all the buddies he’s hiring think he’s great too.

I fail to see what value academic freedom adds to the bottom line of a sports franchise, Daniels is simply increasing profits by having his company give the customer what Daniels the customer wants.
It’s not like he’s tampering with the agribusiness sector, it’s just nerds who talk.

Well as a matter of common sense, if you really though Zinn was pernicious, you wouldn’t ban his book–you’d subject it to intense study, so that its flaws are exposed. Banning it suggests that you find it convincing . . .

Or you could have students read a variety of sources and figure things out for themselves. I never had a college-level history course that consisted of one text, hell, I don’t think I had one that had less than 10.

Also it is quite all right to celebrate Zinn every time he is mentioned rather than unload a heaping pile on People’s History. It’s well worth reading and includes plenty of historical voices that aren’t well represented in American historiography.

“It’s well worth reading and includes plenty of historical voices that aren’t well represented in American historiography.”

The first part of that statement is true enough but the second part is completely false. All of the voices he discusses are quite well-represented in American historiography. Most of them were pretty well represented when the book was published in 1980. And they certainly have been expanded upon today. Most of those topics have hundreds, if not over 1000 books written on them.

Then why are you picking on it compared to any other standard textbook?

I have a feeling that when history professors mention their profession to someone, they have to deal with people who say stuff like, “I love US history! A People’s History Changed My Life™” and this gets on their nerves.

Once again, James Q. Wilson has many texts accepted as “standard”, and he was somewhat conservative, and presumably the texts are as flawed as any other, but I don’t hear the same seething hostility to him from historians that I hear when Zinn’s name comes up.

The best yet least relevant criticism I’ve heard is that it is not an original work of historiography, and is rather just a rehash of history collected from other sources. Which is true as far as it goes but sounds more like professional resentment against a colleague who wrote a popular text rather than getting famous for original research.

Because a) as a work of history, it has real problems, b) it creates an overly simplistic narrative of American history for its readers, and c) it, albeit unintentionally on the part of Zinn, gives rise to false claims about the historical profession and claims that Zinn was telling stories other historians wouldn’t tell–which wasn’t even true when he wrote the book.

I think most of the people who read this book at age 23 and say they didn’t get this history when they were in college were actually just not paying attention when they were 18 and took their U.S. history survey course.

I had an early American history course where the profs used People’s History as the primary text, though not the exclusive one. The focus was clearly on the idea of how seeing history through the lens of those not in power changes the perspective. It’s quite possible that some young Horowitz types might have gotten the idea that they were in some kind of liberal indoctrination factory but that wouldn’t be the first time the point flew undisturbed over a delicate flower conservative’s head.

I always thought people should read Dos Passos in American history classes. But maybe that’s not entirely appropriate.

Obviously, the person in the best position to determine academic syllabi in public universities in Indiana is the governor. How ridiculous.

I’d be fairly critical of a historian who used Zinn as his primary text for an American history survey, but there’s all kinds of ways Zinn could probably be used usefully, and it’s certainly none of Mitch Daniels’s fucking business.

This really is the kind of thing that should be absolutely disqualifying for a post in academic administration at any level. I’m a bit disturbed that the calls for him to resign aren’t significantly louder.

It will probably help sell a few books, and I imagine some youngsters who couldn’t care less about history might be motivated to read something that Mitch Daniels thinks they shouldn’t. So, on the whole this is a win.

Isn’t it funny how we’re programmed to make Marx’s work Capital other-ly by calling it “Das Kapital“? There’s a lot of other things we read in translation, but it’s unusual not to translate their titles.

Isn’t it funny how we’re programmed to make Marx’s work Capital other-ly by calling it “Das Kapital“? There’s a lot of other things we read in translation, but it’s unusual not to translate their titles.

The only other one that comes to mind is “A la recherche du temps perdu”. You hear the French title a lot more than you hear people calling it “In search of lost time” or whatever. And “Anabasis” – no one talks about ‘Xenophon’s “The March Up”‘.
My suspicion is that, for those two, it’s because there isn’t a single obvious translation into English, and all the translations sound a bit weak and woolly. (As does “Capital”.)

Is the rule here that, when we disagree with something, we leave it in the original German to make it sound more weird and threatening? (See also “Panzers”. Panzer just means armour. We don’t talk about the French army having “chars”, we say “tanks”. But the Germans had “Panzers”.)

As amused as I am by the idea of a classic titled Dante’s Really Hot Place, “inferno” translates more literally into “lower regions.” Either way, though, you’ve got some great porn-parody title potential.

I went back and reread the comments on the ‘Problems with Zinn’ post but I don’t think there were many recommendations for alternatives to Zinn or anything close to that

new, beautifully-written synthesis of a progressive American history to update and replace the old standard, something that would avoid Zinn’s Manichean view of the world and deal with the questions he didn’t want to try and answer.

Do I want to see Wayne LaPierre punished in the way many of us wanted to see Tony Hayward punished during the BP oil spill or the way many of us wanted to see Dick Cheney punished during the Iraq War. Of course.

Hey, Manju? Your mother is not consistent with the First Amendment, because she’s so fat that when she’s on the National Mall, she obstructs the people from peaceably assembling and petitioning the Government for a redress of grievances.

She is also so fat that she’s physically unable to break the Third Amendment; when she was in the army she tried to get herself quartered in someone’s house in time of peace, but the only way they could get her to fit was to sixteenth her.

a friendly warning….i’m afraid you’re in violation of Paul Campos’ cutting-edge civil rights issue. i know he sounds like a quack, but look what happens to those who cross him. just ask every other Law School Dean, not to mention Brian Leiter.

To be clear, I’m not taking issue with his position on Tony Hayward or Dick Cheney, but Wayne LaPierre.

i withheld fire on this point while loomis was under siege by censors, but now that he’s free and waxing poetic about free speech, i thought it apropos to finally take the 2×4 to his absolutely batshit insane interpretation of the 1A.

Nah. He “wants to see” it. I had a girlfriend who screwed my life up pretty badly; I “want to see” her living in poverty to a ripe old age. But I’m probably not going to ask the government to take away all her money.

I tend to agree with the criticisms of People History as a stand alone history, and Zinn himself did not think it should be read as such. However, I view it as one long sidebar to the history we do get in textbooks.